Regina city council delays vote on proposed mega-projects

The City of Regina has decided to move the city council vote for all of the catalyst committee’s proposed mega-projects to a later date.

During Wednesday’s executive committee meeting, councillors decided to postpone discussions around building a multi-purpose event centre, multi-purpose outdoor baseball event centre and synthetic outdoor soccer field as well as modernizing the central library from next Wednesday to March 22.

However, Mayor Sandra Masters told the Greg Morgan Morning Show on Thursday the new aquatic centre will be voted on separately by city council next Wednesday.

“We’re peeling out the aquatic centre because … the application for the Infrastructure Canada funding that we want to apply for is due March 14,” she said.

According to Masters, the city needs the funding because it can’t finance the centre on its own.

“There’s not a vote on council yet, but my general sense is that they’re highly supportive of an aquatic centre,” she said.

Masters told reporters during a media scrum Wednesday that she wished a new aquatic centre had been built 13 years ago because it would probably be half the price.

“I have an ongoing frustration with playing catch-up … We’re an affordable city. We know we have infrastructure needs. How are we balancing these things off?” she added.

“I think an important part of the inflationary note is that (we) have to be really smart about the debt of other levels of government or private funding that comes in and doing the analysis on the tradeoff on now versus 10 years from now.”

Masters told Morgan on Thursday that the other projects will be discussed after the vote on the pool because council feels more public consultation is necessary.

“I think where council was coming from (was that) they were specifically focused in on the eventplex. (That’s) the one they want more consultation of,” the mayor said. “The instruction to administration was to do a survey around the eventplex.”

Masters adds this will be done by having residents answer a short online survey, which she says should be out next week.

“(Since March 22 isn’t very far away), it’ll have to be very narrow in the terms of its questions and answers, like yes/no,” she said.

Some of council’s concerns include locating a new arena downtown, the mayor said.

“There was a survey that was done that said people (don’t want it downtown),” she said. “The catalyst committee … which has three councillors on it … (gave) a multitude of reasons why it should be downtown in terms of activating nightlife, economy (and) bringing hundreds of thousands of visitors who wouldn’t otherwise go downtown.”